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On Wall St., Gender Bias Runs Deep

NEW YORK — No doubt feminists everywhere, especially in the United States, celebrated July 16 when a 37-year-old female Google executive became the multimillion-dollar chief executive of Yahoo, the high-tech pioneer that has been struggling against its rivals.

With her appointment at Yahoo, a position that will pay her as much as $129 million over five years, Marissa Mayer joined an elite tier of women in the technology industry. What is more, she is taking over Yahoo while pregnant with her first child, due in October, and has said she will take only a few weeks of maternity leave. (This is likely to add fire to the debate over home versus career renewed by an article in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” which was discussed in this column in June.)

The ascent of Ms. Mayer and women like Meg Whitman at Hewlett-Packard, Virginia Rometty at I.B.M. and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook contrasts sharply with the continuing misfortunes of many women on Wall Street.

In the spring, when JPMorgan Chase disclosed a $3 billion trading loss (which has since climbed to an estimated $5.8 billion), Ina R. Drew, the head of the bank’s chief investment office, became the first casualty. Ms. Drew resigned immediately and is now expected to lose the equivalent of two years’ compensation, an estimated $30 million, for her involvement in the fiasco.

Her departure followed unceremonious exits last year by female executives on Wall Street, where the scarcity of women in top positions has become a bitter symbol of the low status women hold in U.S. corporate life. JPMorgan Chase lost Heidi Miller, the former head of the bank’s international operations, and at Bank of America, Sallie Krawcheck, who ran the company’s wealth management division, also left. Zoe Cruz, another high-profile Wall Street executive and former co-head of Morgan Stanley, was ousted in 2007.

The figures tell an alarming story. Women make up more than half of the work force in the financial industry but are chief executives at fewer than 3 percent of U.S. financial companies, according to Catalyst, a New York-based global research and consulting nonprofit focused on women’s career advancement.

Why is Wall Street so slow to promote women? Is that a reflection of U.S. society in general or is there a peculiarity to the Wall Street experience?

“The Wall Street culture is characterized by what you might call really macho kinds of behavior,” said Ilene H. Lang, Catalyst’s president and chief executive. “So what’s looked up to on Wall Street are people who swagger, people who will do the deal at any cost, people who will work day and night, hour and hour, for lots and lots of money and they don’t care about anything else.”

“Those are characteristics that you think about when asked to talk about what the Wall Street culture is,” she said in an interview. “That’s a very masculine, macho culture, again a stereotype, and, in general, it’s very hard for women or men to picture women being that way because that conflicts with the stereotypic norms of what women should be like.”

Ms. Lang, a trailblazer in the high-tech and Internet industries who has headed Catalyst for nine years and holds an M.B.A. from Harvard, continued, “Women who behave in those macho ways are then perceived as being very masculine, and that’s considered very unattractive. While men are aggressive, women are labeled with the ‘B word.’ It is behavior that’s admired in men but despised in women.”

She called it a double bind. This fits an overall pattern, she said, that is specific not to Wall Street but exists wherever traditionally macho behavior is what it takes to be successful. Stereotypic bias runs through everything, she said, like lack of access to networks, lack of role models and gender definition.

Stereotypic bias is among the toughest barriers women face. It defines “what women should do, what they can do, what they’re good at,” she said. “Men are natural leaders and women are not; men are strong and women are weak; and men are in charge and women are caretakers. These are gender stereotypes. It’s what social culture is all about.”

Gender bias runs deep. “This is what researchers call implicit bias,” Ms. Lang said. Studies by Catalyst and others over recent decades show that “if you compare a man and a woman, when everything else is the same — their wealth, their education, their I.Q., their physical attractiveness and capability — you will always find that the man has more advantages than the woman.”

For some time now, much has been made about mentoring women to break through in male-dominant fields. But a Catalyst survey of female and male M.B.A. graduates around the world showed that mentors might not do much for women. Men’s mentors are much more highly placed and more likely to be chief executives than women’s mentors. “Therefore, the men were getting what we call sponsorships,” Ms. Lang noted. “They were getting more advice, they were getting opportunities, and they were getting promoted.”

Ms. Lang sees encouraging signs in the recent elevation of women in the high-tech industry. But when it comes to Wall Street and most of corporate America, things have not changed much, she said. “There have been very few role models, and they haven’t lasted very long.”